Sunday, August 26, 2012

There's a collider under GenevaReaching new energies that we've never achieved beforeFinally we can see with this machineA brand new data peak at 125 GeVSee how gluons and vector bosons fuseMuons and gamma rays emerge from something newThere's a collider under GenevaMaking one particle that we've never seen before

The complex scalarElusive bosonEscaped detection by the LEP and TevatronThe complex scalarWhat is its purpose?It's got me thinking

Chorus:We could have had a model (Particle breakthrough, at the LHC)Without a scalar field (5-sigma result, could it be the Higgs)But symmetry requires no mass (Particle breakthrough, at the LHC)So we break it, with the Higgs (5-sigma result, could it be the Higgs)

Baby I have a theory to be toldThe standard model used to discover our quantum worldSU(3), U(1), SU(2)'s our gaugeMake a transform and the equations shouldn't change

The particles then must all be masslessCause mass terms vary under gauge transformationThe one solution is spontaneousSymmetry breaking

Roll your vacuum to minimum potentialBreak your SU(2) down to massless modesInto mass terms of gauge bosons they goFermions sink in like skiers into snow

Lyrics and arrangement by Tim Blais and A Capella ScienceOriginal music by Adele

Saturday, August 25, 2012

“You don’t recognize
me at all, do you?” she asked and I hate it when a woman asks that question in
that tone of voice.But no. There wasn’t
anything familiar about the woman at all. I didn’t just not remember her name I
couldn’t remember anything at all about her.

“I’m Donna Lewis, from the gym”

I hadn’t seen Donna Lewis in the last five or so years. I
had left one gym where she worked out and joined another across town. But there
was Donna, in her sweats and an old tee shirt, and at first I didn’t recognize
her at all. When she said her name it clicked and then I realize she had gained
weight. Wow. So the gym wasn’t working? Geez, it’s a death sentence for a man
to mention a woman’s weight.

“Yeah, I know, I got fat.” She said.

Now I hated it even worse because either she saw that look
on my face or she has really let herself go and hates herself for it, or both.
My mind searched for something, anything, to change the subject.

“Hey!” Thank dog almighty there was an out! “You’re wearing
a ring! Who did you get married to? And I remember she had a son. She and a
friend of hers were always talking about what weird things their sons got into.
Both were eighteen at the time and…

“I uh,” and she looked away, and then got a little red in
the face. “Norma and I got married a year ago or so.”

That would be her friend with the son. Well, Mike, a woman who
didn’t recognize at all because of her weight gain is coming out to her
apparent switch in the batter’s box. I tried to think of another subject, like
maybe the Ebola virus.

“She gained weight too.” Donna blurts out and I can see she
wished she had never said that either.

I hear the sound of dogs barking and I wake up. I was asleep.
All of this was a dream. I never knew anyone named Donna Lewis who had a friend
named Norma.

Donna Lewis is the name of a Welch singer who had a hit that
played on the radio for a while in the late 90’s. I remember the song because
of the lyrics, “you’ve got…the most unbelievable blue eyes I’ve ever seen” and
don’t ask me why that stuck in my head.But that Donna Lewis is real. The Donna Lewis in the store isn’t.

I remember there being two women in the gym who hung out
together and they were always talking about, Paul, the son one of them had. He
had a friend who was a train wreck of a teenager who was always coming up with
some scheme to win the battle of wits with the law, even though he was unarmed.
He surmised the best way to get out of a DUI was to leap out of his car as soon
as the cops stopped and immediately start guzzling whiskey straight out of the
bottle in full view of their dashboard camera. The thought here was they couldn’t
prove he was drunk before he started drinking right there on the spot.

I think the dream was based on those people from that time
period of my life, but the physical appearance of the woman, the name, the
relationship with the other woman, none of the details were right. Yet in the
dream I “remembered” her. There was a reference to her in my mind. There was a
shared past between us in the gym and memories of other people. I knew who Norma
was. I remembered who they both were.

As disconcerting as it might be neither of these women exist
outside my mind, it was just a dream, so I do realize my mind invented them for
reasons I cannot explain. We accept this
sort of hallucinations because we aren’t walking around in the grocery store
having memories that aren’t there. But
sometimes people do that sort of thing and the rest of us think they’re totally
nuts.

I’m fairly sure I don’t talk in my sleep so the vocalization
part of a dream doesn’t occur in that regions of the brain governing speech. There is a clear difference in most of us
between dreaming and being awake, and that difference is more than just the
sleep mode. Yet we all know our minds do not work in the “normal” manner in
which we believe the mind should work. We see things that are not there, we
cannot remember names, we lost our train of thought and cannot through any sort
of effort, remember why we walked into a room. These are not personal quirks
but rather the human condition. At the same time, while recognizing all of this
as true, we still cling to what is “normal” as a whole, even though we experience
abnormal mind activity on a near hourly basis.

As you read this you might agree with what I am saying or
you might disagree with what I’m saying, but at the same time you do understand
the words you’re reading. My mind has laid out in, I hope, an orderly fashion
words that will convey what I am thinking. If I have done my job then your mind
will be able to take these symbols and you’ll be able to think, “Gee, how many
times have a forgotten a name, or lost my glasses while wearing them, or couldn’t
remember something I knew I knew?” and we can have a discussion as to why this
is and what it might mean.

Suppose we were to invent a new word. This word was to
describe a slight and temporary mental illness which causes the sufferer to
totally be unable to recall names, numbers, and the location of eyewear.“Pseudo-amnesia” which would mean “false
Amnesia” might be a nice term, but in this sense, why don’t we call it “Norma”?
We shall have everything right in the
mind with the word “Normal” and when things go missing we lose the “l” and
things are “Norma” Of course, those women, and likely a man or two with the
name Norma might object but I suspect they are a minority and historically speaking,
they’re going to lose this battle. Likely, somewhere in history, the Normas
will rise up against the oppression and be free, but not until I stop walking
around the house looking for my glasses while they are hiding on top of my
head.

You know I am not serious in this but at the same time you
do understand that Norma is a condition we all suffer from. Memory can be
invented as well as deleted or hidden. What is supposed to be there isn’t and
what is there is fiction of the most bizarre form. We cannot tell one from the other without help
from other people who are suffering from Norma also.

Can you remember the name of the singer who I mentioned
earlier? Can you remember the name of the son? What name popped into your head
as you tried to remember? If you closed the window on this essay and did not
return to it until you remembered both names could you remember to return here
to report how long it took?

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Suppose you were to sit down and copy this paragraph, word
for word, sentence for sentence, with all the errors and ugliness in it intact.
You might discover some eternal flaw in its structure while you were copying it
especially if you were writing it out longhand. You might look at one of the
sentences and realize it could be have made better by adjusting a comma or the
exit of a word or two or perhaps even made better by the simple deletion of the
whole affair in total. That would be depressing for me at the very least but it
would not be the first time axed words have been declared acceptable losses in
the name of readability.

So what was that paragraph trying to tell you? What did it
say? Dog forbid but suppose that paragraph was the last remains of the last
document written in English left for some other civilization to find? Suppose
some cryptologist of arcane languages happened upon the parchment and from that
had to discern the intent of the author, long turned into moldy dust and
sentence fragments. Hell, is there enough there for you to see where I am
going, much less someone who has never seen the English language?

If writing is a lost art then editing is the Atlantis of the
writing world these days. I will be the first to admit my editing skills are
somewhere between a slow train wreck and a bad snake bite. I finally realized,
very late in the game, that poorly edited work is the same as poorly written
work. Being a good writer means being a good editor. Writing well means editing
carefully and I have to confess I am not a very good editor at all, yet.
Becoming a good editor isn’t as hard as being a good writer but editing isn’t
as much fun as writing. Writing is the party and editing is the hangover.

We should be so lucky if our civilization is judged by the
skill of someone like Mark Twain. Yet suppose all that was found was a bit of
“Huckleberry Finn” where the eponymous character was engaged in conversation
with his faithful companion, Jim, the slave. Without any knowledge of the
English language the future archeologists might very well believe the dialect
spoken was the standard by which all English was written or spoken. The depth
of the writing would be revealed only if the researchers could in fact discern how
well the piece was edited. We should quake for how our civilization is
portrayed if my editing is how they judge us.

I am one of the few writers who is not only fully self
taught in the craft of writing but who is also a self taught editor. I went for
many years believing good writing made up for bad editing but the reality is
that writing does not drag bad editing up but rather bad editing drags good
writing down. A confused verb or a misspelled word can stick in the mind of a
reader like someone watching a Shakespearean play noticing one of the actors
wearing bright red running shoes and a Britney Spears tee shirt. How many
readers have stopped reading an essay once they’ve mentally corrected the first
few errors? As a writer I am here to tell you these people are the target audience
of those who aspire to write well. The best readers demand and they deserve,
the best writing. These are the connoisseurs of the written word, picky
consumers of the craft, and those most likely to fall in love with the ideal. No matter how hurried or tired or even
impressed with what has been written, please remember that it will have to be
read, and judged, not only by content but also by that last coat of paint, and
perhaps, only by that. No matter how well your house is designed if the paint
job looks like it was applied by evil space monkeys then selling that house
will be a bit of a problem.

The last work I sent out to be looked at by a professional
editor came back with fewer errors than I feared yet more than I had hoped. I
thought it had been combed over very well and considering out of ten thousand
or so words fewer than a half dozen were edited I thought it was still pretty
good. The downside to this is I made what I thought was a heroic effort to edit
the material. Six mistakes out of ten thousand words may not seem important but
if only perfection will do then only perfection should be done.

I do not understand editors. I suspect a lot of them are
failed writers but so are most writers. I also suspect many failed writers are
failed editors in some way, too. Yet I do know people who like editing and have
no real need to write. That’s mystifying to me but it is not my place in the
Universe to comprehend what other people enjoy. I must admit dealing with an
editor is much akin to dealing with a butcher who is supposed to be pet sitting
a sacred cow. That person may claim to know who much you love the cow and that
person may profess a knowledge of how much the cow means to you, but at the
same time this is the person who is going to very matter of factly discuss
trimming away, nay, hacking away, a good piece of your cow and then tell you
the best parts are now what’s left.

There are no famous documents with editing issues. No one
ever discusses the spelling errors in the Declaration of Independence or the
sentence fragments in “The Lord of the Rings”. No one speaks in glowing terms
bestselling novels and then laments the lack of editing skills on the part of
the writers.The two go hand in hand;
good writing means good editing. But do not confuse the issue here because good
editing will not save bad writing. It can only condemn good writing to a
discussion of what might have been.

The Demon Core was the nickname given to a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium that accidentally went critical on two separate instances at the Los Alamos laboratory in 1945 and 1946. Each incident resulted in the acute radiation poisoning and subsequent death of a scientist. After these incidents the mass of plutonium was referred to as the Demon Core.
The
so-called Demon Core was used in an atomic bomb test in 1946, five
weeks after the last accident with it, and proved in practice to have a
slightly increased yield over similar cores which had not been subjected
to criticality excursions.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Back a couple of years ago there was a man who was going around in Austin Texas putting drugs into the drinks of other men and then raping them. A reporter for MSNBC wrote an article stating that men were more traumatized by sexual assault than women because women has a one in four chance of being sexually assault during their lifetimes and sexual assault rarely happened to men. I didn't have time enough to post the link to the story before they killed it but I do remember being truly stunned by the man's attitude. I really thought no one else was going to ever say anything that stupid again, but thank you Todd Akin. You've managed to top even that.

Updated:

"What I said was ill-conceived and it was wrong, and
for that, I apologize." excerpt from Todd Akin's apology where irony meets
idiocy. But if his remarks were "ill conceived" does that mean he is
legitimately sorry or does it mean those words were raped from him?

Saturday, August 18, 2012

It’s hard for me to admit it but I am not a match for Lucas. I’m
fifty-one years old and Lucas weighs over one hundred pounds, I have about
sixty-five pounds on him but that is human mass not animal mass. A young man in
his prime, might, just maybe, hold his own with a pissed off dog half his
weight, but many things must go right, early and often. A man my age trying to match muscle playing
with a dog the size of Lucas is going to have to make some concessions. The first of these will be if the dog suddenly
gets serious theological questions will be answered.

I do well with dogs. I’ve been bitten before but it has
always been my fault, and it usually is the fault of the human when dealing
with a large dog. They are not toys. They are not slaves. They are not
machines. They have emotions and souls. If you want to get down to the very
heart of a dog you have to take some risks and you will lose some of your bets.
Bert bit me. Sam has bitten me. Sabrina bit me. Spike bit me. Hell, with that
evidence you’d think I didn’t know a damn thing about animals at all, but the
truth is that is their way of swinging on you when you’ve pissed them off. I’ve
been popped a few times by friends of mine, too. Most men have. But I would
like to think that is part of my past, and now I’m getting to the point I can’t
take as many chances with dogs either.

When Lucas and I played I could tell he was holding back and
he was more or less using about a third of what he had. I could wear him out
but I had to use everything I had and he had to have an off day. Lillith’s
introduction into the pack was more than Michelle and I saving yet another dog.
Lillith was meant to be a chew toy for Lucas. I was hoping they would bond, and
in this Lucas would find someone he could be physical with and in that, find a
little more exercise than I was giving him.

I like it when a plan comes together.

Lucas spent the first week or two hiding under the table. He
was not sure what Lillith was, or why she was there, but he sure as hell didn’t
like the idea of there being a puppy made entirely of the cute roaming free in
the house. But she was demur as well as cute and even Sam fell in love with
her. Lucas fell too, but it took a while for the two to really make some
contact. I was hoping they would play. I was hoping they would romp. I was
hoping Lucas wouldn’t just roll over her and hurt her, because she’s big, and I
had hoped she could at the very least, hold her own.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Michelle came to visit for a month and about a week deep in
that month Lucas and Lillith hit their stride. Maybe Lucas was just trying to
find out how much she could take, or maybe he just wasn’t used to playing with
a puppy, or maybe these things just take time, but all of a sudden those two
started the biting of the faces and the making of wild hippo noises and the
running rampant through the house and it was on. They discovered they would be
shouted at running rampant through the house so they moved that part out into the
yard and the woods.

When he was bitten by the Cottonmouth back on June the first,
Lucas pushed the scales at one hundred seven pounds and he was, to be kind,
stout. Now with Lillith pushing him, chasing him, running from him, Lucas has
trimmed down a lot, and Lillith hasn’t hit her adult weight yet. Lucas has the
puppy he always wanted and he has much more than that, too. Lillith isn’t some
half sized version of a dog but a full hearted version of a Pibble. There is no
quit in her. There is no fear in her. There isn’t an ounce of aggression and I
wouldn’t allow it if there was, but Lucas is discovering that she can take much
more than he can give, and she can give more than he can handle.

One sympathizes.

Lillith is a very sweet little girl. But she is what she is.
There is within every dog someone who will fight kill and die in prot4ection of
those they love. From the smallest yappy dog to the true giants of the canine
world, you mess with the loved ones of the dogs at your own peril. A twenty
pound mutt will attack a Grizzly bear and fight to win if there is a loved one
in danger.Lillith has the genetic makeup,
if not the mass, to protect to the end. Relentless and energetic, she is everything
Lucas wanted and then she is more. She leaps, launches, and run at angles that Lucas,
with all his muscle, cannot manage. Accustomed
to wrestling with Sam and myself, Lucas has been set upon by someone much
smaller, much lighter, much more agile, and much more driven than he has ever
had to deal with.

Lucas, in a word, is in love.

So now Sam watches from the window as the two younger pack
members roll around in the yard and play chase. I watch too. So passes from my
hands to the paws of Lucas, to train and wear out, the puppy, and in turn she
wears him down, also. I need large dogs. I want large dogs. But in this, I
understand the need for them to exercise at a level I cannot do and still hope
to walk the next day. Sam and I watch the puppies play. Lillith tackles Lucas
and I can see he is surprised she’s managed to flatten him with such a small
body.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

You’d like to write but who has the time? Just thinking
about what you want to write takes up most of your creative energy and then
once you sit down to write all those ideas that were fluttering around in your
head like drunk butterflies are now still fluttering around. It’s hard to
capture the right one that will serve as a beginning, isn’t it? You can’t just
launch a bunch of words and hope they land in a sentence, can you? They
certainly will not line up to become a paragraph and even if they did what in
the hell would you do with it anyway?

The thing to do is wait until the most right time and have
the most right frame of mind and then have the right chair, and maybe a glass
of wine nearby, but not too much wine, just the right amount. It has to be
perfectly quiet or you can’t write or there has to be some good background
music and may dog forbid there be a reality television program on at the time
the right times swings around. There are the kids, the spouse, the dishes and
the laundry. There is a text conversation to have with your sister over what
her dog did today and there’s…

The creative is a lot like sex. If you want sex, and you
want sex from someone you know is available, and you know that available person
is going to be ready if you can make the effort to provide the readiness, then
you’re going to get down and get it done. You, I suspect, are a lot like those
guys who lay claim, no pun intended, to being studly, but deep down inside they
have performance issues. If you only write when you have everything right then
you’re a lot like those who claim to want sex but can’t do it with the lights
on or with their socks off.

Good sex and good writing will knock your socks off.

When did it happen to you? When you were a child passion and
curiosity appeared out of nowhere and you could get worked up over the sight of
a bird in the sky or some different color you had never seen. When you were a
teenager the wind could change direction and suddenly the air was filled with
pheromones and your heartbeat drummed out a rhythm that could be heard by an
interested party five feet away in a hurricane. Once upon a time in your life
you would have done anything and everything to get someone’s pants off even if
you had to do it in the backseat of a car and you only had thirty minutes before
you had to take her home. You remember how it felt to want something that
badly?

I’m not here to call you a coward or tell you what you have
isn’t enough anymore. It could be you’re like one of those people who would
like to run a marathon but you’re built to bench press three hundred pounds
instead. Writing isn’t for everyone despite the fact there are a lot of people
who know enough about it to put the period in the right place. I humbly submit
to you there is a little bit more to the process than just the ability to type
sixty words a minute and an idea that there is a difference between effect and
affect.

If you can’t string together a simple sentence under the
best conditions then when things get iffy you aren’t going to do much better,
unless you’re one of those grace under pressure people who have to be twenty
minutes late before they can get started. And hell, even the very best hit
spots where whatever they write just isn’t right. But the idea that overall, in
any given week, you can’t find time to write it better mean you’re on vacation
at the beach or in jail or even kidnapped by natives. You do realize there are
writers who have written well under those conditions, don’t you? You ought to
consider the fact there are ways to get things done even under conditions those
with less passion might hesitate to try.

When someone asks me how I came to be a writer I tell them I
wrote. There is no other way. There are no secrets, no shortcuts, no tricks of
the trade to learn that make it anything than hard work. Editing is even
harder. I suck at editing but I am getting better because that is also part of
the process that is called writing. It took me a very long time to realize
that. Once you learn something you have to work at it to keep from unlearning
it. Stay sharp by practice and stay clear by commitment. But this is work, hard
work, and you’ll put as much into a thousand word essay as you would
bringingyour partner to orgasm.

You will, that is, if you care.

You do have to know what you are going to write, kind of, to
write. What you see before you was not planned or thought out; I sat down to
write and this is what was there. I did know something was there. I was aroused
with creativity and like getting together with someone who was just a second
ago lying on the bed reading, the contents was spontaneous even if the act
itself was not.

I write this during lunch at work. With an office full of
people wandering around, shouting at one another, and banging into things, I
managed to write because I wanted to write. I needed to write. I wrote because
it is what I do rather than eating, shouting or banging into things. I write
this for you because there are people who need to know that in less than an
hour writing can be done to effect. The affect is has on people who are trying
to write are dramatic. Why aren’t you writing? You do have time.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Summer in August can be a brutal thing here in South Georgia,
and it usually is. Here recently it has been much wetter and far cooler than we’ve
seen in years. A few years ago we had an August where the heat jammed into the triple
digits and stayed there for most of the month. I can still remember pouring
concrete at three thirty in the morning because the heat was so terrible during
the day.Days and days and weeks and
weeks of steamy, hot, oppressive, and never ending heat pounded the whole of the
region until a day in the upper nineties seemed like a cold snap.

But this is not the August I was expecting. The temperatures
have stayed in the low nineties, and it has rained nearly every day this month,
so far. It’s the twelfth of August already, and while this is by no means the
end of the Summer, it isn’t really as brutal as it has been known to be. There have
been times when the end of August has cooled and become milder, which is what
we’re having now. Yes, August has also been known to last until the last part
of September, and I never really look for a break in the heat until October,
but even that benchmark is less than fifty days away. If things keep going like
they have I will have to mow the yard only twice more this month.

Heat means more growth for grass and there is no denying
that but the light of day has a say in the matter, also. Now, even in what
should be some of the hottest days of the season, there are signs the days are
getting shorter. The wild grapes are producing fruit and their leaves are
turning gold. The lower branches of the Chinaberry trees are losing their
leaves. These are the trees that just a couple of weeks ago were nearly
blue-green with life and energy. Their leaves were thick, full, and very dark
with color, yes, just a couple of weeks ago this was how it was, and the heat gripped
South Georgia as always in Summer. The long range forecast, the ten day
forecast that is, tells us the mild conditions will continue. In ten days we
will be a month away from the Equinox. Summer is a long way from being over and
no one denies that truth. Yet there is it right in front of us all; it is
ending, slowly, but just as surely as last Summer did, and the Summer before
that one.

At seven this morning it was still not light enough to see
to mow, but by seven thirty I was out in the yard. The mornings are still
hovering around the mid-seventies so the humidity makes it seem so much warmer.
I’m nearly a quarter of the way done with the front yard when the first broad band
of sunlight tears into the front yard, splitting the shadows like firewood.
Despite the rain the grass seems less thick, not nearly as sturdy, and it is
easier to mow than even last week’s crop. The mower is muted because I wear
earplugs and I listen to the one word song of the two stroke engine as the sun
rises and the heat tries to keep up.

There is a very young and very wayward Garter snake in my
path so I catch him, and release him into the planted pines over the fence.
Tine was when a new snake excited me but what was once exciting when I was a
boy is now just another event of the day. The wonder of the world is muted from
responsibilities and duties and chores and mowing. The day cannot begin for me,
writing cannot begin for me, until this is work is done, and I know it will be
hours before I am through. The sun continues to rise, I push the mower, it eats
the grass, and time trickles away like the sweat on my back.

I need a new blade, but should I buy one this last in the
season? These great questions and more drift in and out of my mind. A thorny
and green vine has survived last week’s mowing and now it races across the yard
fully two meters in length. The mower misses it again so I back up and again it
lives through the spinning death above. These are the vines that choke young
trees to death so they must go. I pull the thing up by the roots and make a
note to get a new blade.

I head back towards the shed and the mower coughs and
sputters as I arrive. The gas tank is empty and I have timed it well. I refuel and
keep going. In hotter times I would take a break but I want to get done before the
sun gets too high in the sky. By next week I may be thinking of letting it go
until the following week, and by the next week I will certainly be able to let
it go for ten days. The vines are coming up now, I see them with new eyes now
that I have looked and this is one of the sure signs of a Summer in decay. The
angle of the sunlight is not as conducive for trees and grass as it is for
vines. I remind myself it is too soon to be optimistic about August but by this
time next week it will be over half gone.

May was hot, June was hotter, July was brutal, and now
August is almost one third of the way done. Where did it go? I look over the
yard and it looks different for I have done a lot of work outside this season.
There is a new dog in Lillith this Summer. Bert is no longer here. I worried so
much about how he would handle the Summer and he never made it that far. The
seasons come and go, the leaves begin to turn, the grass grows, the rain falls,
and I wonder how the Summer of 2012 has begun to slip away from me, even as I
welcome the end.

Friday, August 10, 2012

As a class of human beings writers have a history of both
substance abuse and insanity. Suicide isn’t as rare among writers as I would
like to see, but for that matter, it isn’t as rare as it could be either. But
grab your razor because we’re about to go splitting hairs. I also think that suicide
ought to be legal and if someone wants to check out early that is entirely up
to that person. It may seem a contradiction to want to see less suicides and
see suicide be legal, but I’m willing to bet it’s the tabooness of it, that
black smoke in the middle of the day thing, that drives many people towards it.

Hunter S. Thompson shot himself at age 67. I suspect there
were more than a few demons wrestling around in Thompson’s attic and the man
had a history with firearms. Yet he was also in failing health. Thompson’s star
had risen and now was beginning to fade. His legendary binges with drugs and
alcohol were the stuff of both fiction and nonfiction but as a man growing
older his body could not afford the time spent in a chemical state. Thompson
may have shot himself because he was chemically imbalanced and who could doubt
that? Yet he may have also opted to check out of a life he could no longer
reinvent. Or it may have been some combination of the two. I would suggest none
of us are capable of judging which is which and who is who.

So why would I legalize suicide? If Thompson could have been
treated for mental illness should he have been? Suppose someone was sitting
alongside the road with a broken leg and refused treatment? Would you, could you,
compel that person to be treated? A co-worker with a sucking chest wound might
prompt you to call 9-1-1 but if someone you work with strike up a conversation
with an imaginary friend and you’re most likely to just ease away from the
crazy person, aren’t you? You might get
bloody and all gory trying to stop the bleeding if someone was ravaged by a
paper cut but let someone slip into depression and where are you then?

Certainly you would not advocate, and I am not advocating,
anyone who has been bitten on the thigh by a Great White Shark be given a
pistol so they might end the suffering they feel early. Now, do you see why
there are razors and hairs? At first glance legal suicide seems an easy issue
to decide but framed in the context of physical suffering then suddenly the
water gets murky.

So what if you’re one of those never-say-die people who
think no one has the right to end it all in any case? Someone dying of cancer
ought to have the option if you ask me and you should ask me because I’ve
watched people die before. Some wouldn’t. Some might. Some might ask if there
was a way out and maybe they would not have if there wasn’t but I’ve seen
people die of cancer and I think they should have that option. When there isn’t
any other way but down then the person falling should decide when to land.

Conversely, there are people whose mental state of mind can’t
be trusted. James Holmes walked into a crowded theater with malice aforethought
and opened fire on helpless people bent on enjoying a movie. It’s not like
Holmes was sitting in his living room when the cops came bursting in or he was
walking away from the scene of the crime and they just decided to bust the
first person they saw on the street. Holmes is guilty several times over and he
hasn’t denied it yet. Experts are already lining up to discuss whether or not
this man was same enough to understand what he was doing. They fact that he
planned it in advance and went to a lot of trouble to hide the fact he was
planning it tells me he knew exactly what he was doing, even if he doesn’t
understand the suffering he caused.

I’ve got a fairly simple test for all of this. Indulge me in
this one case and I will solve a lot of problems. Take Holmes out to that
theater, put a .22 rifle to the back of his head, and fire two rounds into his
brain. Justice is all about keeping bad things from happening to good people. I
would suggest the Firesmith Plan would eliminate Holmes as a threat to other
human beings.

But this is execution, not suicide, and I stopped advocating
for execution in this country because we do it as poorly as anywhere on earth,
and worse than anywhere but The Democratic Republic of Socialist Freedom Kingdom
of Southeast Sudan. It’s not that we cannot kill people, dog knows we’re great
at that, but killing the right people in a timely fashion escapes us entirely.
The irony of the most violent county on earth not currently less than five
years old who cannot find a way for just capital punishment isn’t lost on most.

What does it say about us that we will relieve our pets of
suffering and not offer that same comfort to our parents? Surely and most
certainly no one advocates letting dogs live in the pain and discomfort of old
age yet we ask, nay demand, that human beings pay for every breath at the end.
We will feed, clothe, house, treat, and entertain anyone who kills many other
people yet we will leave alone to their own devices the sane and poor. We turn
mass murderers into celebrities and philosophers and we hold in disdain those
whose work provide the taxes so those who kill can be treated as prized zoo
animals.

Put that razor in front of Holmes and see if he can pull it
across his wrist and save us all some trouble. I will advocate his suicide, and
never lose a moment of sleep for it. Yet I have to wonder if those we ignore
who leave us aren’t more sane than those we pay attention to when they kill.

Or at least, more sane than the rest of us.

Take Care,

Mike

PS If you have no idea who the woman in the photograph is, yet at the same time you would recognize James Holmes I would suggest you need to add some humanity to your diet of news stories.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

If you’ve never mowed a yard with a push mower just ease on
away from this conversation. This is a dialog between those of us who have
suffered and you will not understand.I
will mention the archaic and the esoteric. I will bring forth from the distant
past those creations which only a few of Jurassic yard keepers still possess.
Yes, if you own a zero turn radius mower or have never felt the despair of a
broken pull rope, please, move along. There is little reason for you to see
this sort of thing anyway, unless you are one of those people who stop and
stare at traffic accidents while the bodies are being piled up and burned.

I knew I was screwed when I set my sights on mowing at seven
and when seven rolled around I had not finished the first cup of coffee. Seven
thirty became the new seven and when I fueled up I realized I didn’t have
enough to finish, nor to even begin really well, but there is always some wild
hope against reason and logic when it comes to mowing. I thought it might snow
last night and get me out of this but no. August and South Georgia mean there
is as much chance of Zombie Apocalypse as snow and there were no walking dead
in the yard except for me. But I knew I
was screwed. There was no way that little bit of fuel would last and it didn’t.

I’m married. There is no other condition where a man has to
stand outside his own home and ring the doorbell. I left my wallets and keys
inside and I knew better than to go inside when there is a woman doing
housework and I’m all dirty. I get my
keys, my wallets, and orders to pick up olives while I am out. Olives? The
woman is a master chef with great legs. Olives it is.

There is no way on earth the gas station has olives but I
ask anyway. Olives? The clerk seems confused. Perhaps they do not have olives
in the part of Georgia she is from. Olives you say? Let me ask, but I tell her
not to bother. She does anyway and I can hear the manager ask “Olives?” for he
too comes from a part of the world where that tone of voice is used to ask if
there are olives in a store. Next stop, a dollar store, for I dare not try to
get in and out of the one grocery store in town in less than an hour.

The dollar store has olives but it also has a woman in line
that has a butt much wider than any chair she has ever owned. Or I have ever
owned. Or you have ever owned. This is a massive structure, built on pig fat
and thirty minute sit coms and white sugar. She’s arguing with the clerk about
two lamp shade looking items she has declared were priced two dollars apiece on
the table where she found them. I have seen this before. A customer comes in
and hopes to argue long enough to wear the clerk down. She is hoping the long
line of customers will force the clerk to concede but the clerk is having none
of it. They both go look at the table where the lamp shade looking items were
found and then the would -be customer declares she saw that price in a sales
sheet so that has to be found before she will give up and just go the hell
away. I buy olives and go back to the
yard. Somewhere I will see those olives again. They will be transformed.

The filter of the mower needs cleaning. I bet about ten
percent of the people out there know what I am talking about here. I have to take it off with a screwdriver and I
bet there are only a few people who truly know where the air filter on a push
mower is.Fewer still remember the days
when the rope had to be wound around the mower and pulled again and again and
again. I have not evolved. I ought to be extinct.I can
tell by the engine noise of the mower when the filter is dirty and it is very
dirty right now.More fuel and a clean
filter and hi ho hi ho it’s off to mow I go.

I’ve made in rows into the green areas of the woods and
turned some of it into yard. The vines and wild bushes are trying to push back
but they are no match for the mower, and a man who does not care what he mows
over.This is early August and the heat
will continue unabated for at least another six weeks and maybe even eight
weeks. Yet there are signs, very subtle signs, the Summer of 2012 is beginning
to end. The wild grape vines are just starting to turn gold. The wild flower
vines are beginning to come up en masse.The longest day of the year is almost fifty days away now and in fifty
days we’ll be past the Equinox.For all
the heat and hell that is left in this Summer there are signs it will not last
forever, even if it seems that it will. I will have to mow at least three more
times this month, at a minimum, but then fewer timesnext month.The afternoons are like dragon’s breath and the mornings are still very
warm and the nights are still not cool, but the end is now nearer than the
beginning.

There is something a little Zen about repetitious and
mindless work. The mower becomes white noise and the yard gets smaller with
each step, even though there is over an hour left in mowing. I find a sock that
Lillith dragged out into the yard and I find an old puppy toy that belonged to
Sam. I think about writing this and what I should put in or take away and I
realize that even this mindless and soulless task has its place in writing.The mower has a one word song, the heat picks
up one degree at a time, and the yard gets smaller.

Lucas and I chase away the Jehovah’s Witnesses . I can sense
their fear of him, and Sam, and so can Lucas and Sam. The dogs pick up my
hostility towards the strangers, too. Take your expensive car and your nice
clothes and your Watchtower and be gone! The yard gets smaller. There is a
gourmet meal inside with the woman.The
mower runs out of fuel just as I am done and I take my shoes off to go inside.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

There I was, lying in bed, panting and really not thinking
about movies, or anything else like that, and suddenly a line from the film,
“The Hours” popped into my head when an actor whose name I could not remember
said something like, “We thought that time was the beginning of happiness but
looking back I see now it was happiness” and could not remember her name, but
let’s face it; if you’re in bed happy and panting there are many things that
will slip past your attention. The human mind is supercharged at that point and
the moment is all that counts.

Later I was trying to remember the actor’s name and suddenly
I realized I could remember half a dozen movies she had starred in. Drag out
your mental stopwatch and see how long it takes you to tag her name with these
titles; “Silkwood”, “Sophie’s Choice”, “Out of Africa”, “A Cry in the Dark” and
some movie with Steve Martin that I do not remember the name to even now. Odd,
isn’t it? I could remember Kurt Russell and Cher being in “Silkwood” and Steve
Martin in the other movie, but that woman’s name escaped me entirely.

I vowed not to ask or search for the name but instead
concentrated on the process by which I would conjure the name from my memory. I
ran through the list of movies and who played in them, and that worked to bring
forth other memories of things that had happened, and other co-stars, but not
the name. Oddly, I didn’t remember Nicole Kidman’s name right off the bat but
it surfaced very soon. Julianne Moore’s name escaped me for a longer time but
then it popped up like a cork held under water released. But the other woman’s
name stayed in the blackness, just on the very verge of recovery, yet unseen.

Do you write? Are you a poet? Perhaps you paint, or draw or
create something with your mind. Have you ever had an idea lurking about on the
edges, unformed and undefined, yet somehow real? This is how it felt trying to
recover the name, and I believe trying to recover the name actually makes it
worse. I think the human mind, lacking anything real to grasp, invents things
to fill in the gaps. The name “Sophia” kept popping up. The bathrobe scene kept
popping up. The window scene with Richard kept coming to mind, too, as well as
that ridiculous scene from “The River Wild” where she claims she cannot run
this river or some such.

It’s a trap of sorts. Trying to use your mind to remember something
you have forgotten is like trying to draw water out of paper by setting it on
fire. Creativity and memory are two very different animals; one flies and one
burrows. No matter how hard you try to
remember you’re sabotaging your own efforts.I vowed to fight the good fight and not ask and not look her name up.

The next morning she wasn’t there but the question remained the
same. I could see her face, hear her voice, and oddly, I felt like I knew what
her name felt like. I could feel the name. I could sense it. I knew how many syllables
it had and how it was accented. Everything was clear and perfect to me, except
of course, the name herself. I felt like her name was flashing on a billboard
behind my field of vision and I was seeing the shadow on the clouds above.

So how important is this? Do you remember her name or are
you right there with me? You do realize you’re screwed if you can’t remember by
now, don’t you? There isn’t a device in memory that allows recall that doesn’t
surface in the first few seconds. I mean you just have to wait or use Google or
sit there with some other lost soul and both of you will look at one another as
if you’re both idiots because you both know you know but neither of you can
come up with her name.

You do it all the time and you know it. Names get lost in
the mental mail as if they’re third class packages and maybe they are. Maybe
who someone is can’t be as important as what they’ve done. Can you imagine
being able to recall Jodi Foster’s name and not remember that movie where she’s
a FBI trainee who locks brains with a serial killer? What’s it like to be able
to remember names and nothing that person ever did? Oh yeah, Neil Armstrong
that name just popped out of nowhere and wasn’t he a sports figure or a high
jumper or something?

We remember verbs and forget nouns.

I started trying to go through the alphabet and list names
that started with every letter. Talk about a distraction! Start listing names
like that and suddenly you remember Anna and the King with Jodi Foster and that
reference to that movie leads to another with her in it. It gets worse when you
get to the letter “I” and all you can come up with is ‘Ivy” then you remember
Ingrid and damn, way back when she was really a great actor and suddenly you’re
pinballing the straight hell out of every name that comes up.

Then she was there.

I had gotten seriously distracted with the letter “I”
because of the Ingrid thing and out of the blue the first and last name was
there all along, like ruby slippers with three Oscars and some seriously bad
movies.

Are you there yet?

Seriously, can you remember her name? I can’t help you and
you ought not accept it because that’s just wrong at this point and you know
it. You have to figure this thing out alone or not at all. Surrender not to
Google or some woman who can speak the dialog of “Out of Africa” between sobs.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.